Maison Margiela leaps into Web3

Maison Margiela, the avant-garde fashion house with a uniquely creative oeuvre, is diving into Web3. Yesterday, the brand unveiled a gamified minting experience, weaving together fashion and technology through the Maison Margiela lens. The project centers on merging Maison Margiela’s numeric coding iconography with blockchain tech, encouraging the house’s following to embrace digital collectibles. Maison Margiela customers can collect 24 numbered digital tokens (0 to 23). The fastest to mint the collectible within the 60 second countdown wins the collectible (a term the brand has used in favor of ‘NFT’). Each token has a limited supply, which decreases as the numbers get higher (for example, '0’ has 15,000 collectibles available, whereas ‘23’ only has 742). Every time a user mints a number, the countdown restarts for all participants. These collectibles are expected to play an important role in the yet-to-be-announced next stage of the Maison Margiela community roadmap. The project was originally slated to go live on October 23. However, soon after its launch, the site was closed due to bots. It reopened to the public yesterday. The Paris-based design house has followed in the footsteps of LVMH behemoth Louis Vuitton by making each of the digital assets soulbound to its owner – meaning each token is non-transferable to others. All minting throughout the game is free, with no gas fee applied. Maison Margiela’s crossover into Web3 marks a pivotal step. With a globally-lauded brand like this in the virtual realm, Web3’s reputation across high fashion is shifting from Wild West to a community building hotspot. The past year has seen OTB Group, the parent company of Maison Margiela, invest heavily in its digital playbook, with storied labels including Diesel, Marni – and now Maison Margiela – having each established their own Web3 presence. Powerhouses LVMH and Kering have also turned to gamification in their digital activations to boost appeal. “Gaming is really changing the entertainment system,” Stefano Rosso, board member of the OTB Group, told Jing Daily earlier this year. Today, the challenge for brands is working out how to maintain authenticity, and avoid diluting the foundations that their house codes are built on, while leaning further into digitization.

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Maison Margiela leaps into Web3